Very God of Very God

Contemporary Western culture wants a Jesus who either stays a cute baby in a manger or who grows up to rail against pollution or gun control, big business or labour unions. Absent from contemporary thought is the wonderful and terrible declaration that God, eternal Jehovah, shattered the silence of centuries, rent the heavens, and invaded our world. God became man.

But Christ’s Godhood has not gone unchallenged throughout church history, and much of this opposition stems from the heresy of Arianism. This heresy made its debut in the fourth century through the teachings of a bishop named Arius, whose teachings were condemned at the Nicene Council in AD 325. The creed that resulted from the Council employed the Greek word homoousios (“of the same nature”) to refer to Christ, rejecting Arius’s term homoiusios, “of similar nature.” The church unequivocally proclaimed Christ to be “very God of very God.”

Arius wasn’t done, though. The exiled bishop was recalled around 334 and Arianism became the official faith of the Roman Empire until it was outlawed by Emperor Theodosius in 379 and orthodoxy was reaffirmed in 381. Still, Arian heresies, though stabbed repeatedly, have always managed to keep a limb or two twitching. Today denials of Christ’s deity, though perhaps not technically Arian, hang around in theological modernism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Objections to the Deity of Christ

One common objection is that “Jesus never claimed to be God.” But the problem with this football game is that Arians have set up all the first downs and sidelines beforehand. Since Jesus didn’t walk around distributing Homoousios pamphlets, they conclude He didn’t claim deity. But as the Westminster Confession points out, Scripture should be interpreted by “good and necessary consequence.” That is, by comparing Scripture with Scripture, we can and should logically deduce the consequences of biblical teaching.

Once we establish this mindset, a few things fall into place. The first is Christ’s reply to the flustered crowd that demanded of Him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” He answered, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn. 8:58). Christ is not making a grammatical mistake here. He’s alluding to God’s statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.” Christ, by careful use of language, was claiming to be none other than Jehovah.

Take also Revelation 1:8: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord…the Almighty.” Christ echoes these same words throughout the entire book of Revelation. “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last”; “Fear not; I am the first and the last”; “These things saith the first and the last”; “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (1:11, 1:17, 2:8, 22:13), claiming unmistakably to be equal with the Father. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (Jn. 14:9).

Some Arian apologists point to Matthew 19:16-17: “And [Jesus] said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.” But even this “denial” sounds more like divine claim. When the rich young man addressed Christ as “good Master,” Christ wished to impress on him what the title actually meant. “You know what you’re saying, right? There’s only one who is good-God.”

A second objection involves the fact that the Father and the Son are two distinct Persons. To the Arian, this means that they cannot be one God. Thus Arians often point to texts like Matthew 3:16-17, (which speaks of the Father’s voice at the Son’s baptism), or the texts in which Jesus prays. “See? If Jesus and the Father are one, how can they be in two places at once?”

But this is hardly an accurate representation of Trinitarian theology. Some questions might be in order here, such as, “Why are you covered with straw?” or “What are you doing with those old trousers?” Straw men notwithstanding, the idea that God is only one Person belongs to the heresy of modalism or Sabellianism. Trinitarians don’t deny that the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct in personality. But we insist that they are nevertheless one in essence and substance.

But the Arian isn’t discouraged by these trifles. He has Christ’s statements that “my Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14:28) and that “I can of mine own self do nothing” (Jn. 5:30). And let’s throw in John 20:17: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

The first two texts, however, prove nothing but what systematic theologians call “economic subordination.” This means simply that the three Persons of the Trinity are equal in power and substance, but they act differently with regard to function. The Father bears the role of director, the Son is incarnated according to the will of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds eternally from both Father and Son. Thus Paul says that the head of woman is man, the head of man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God. This idea of “economic subordination” is distinct from the idea of essential subordination, and the Arians fail to make this distinction.

So does John 20:17 prove that Christ is a created being inferior to the Father? Not when we read the verse in its immediate context. Christ said, “I go to my Father and your Father; to my God and your God.” Christ here acknowledges the doctrine of adoption. Through redemption, we become the children of God. In this sense we’re the “brethren” of Christ; we have the same Father (Rom. 8: 29, Jn. 20:17). But our sonship doesn’t make us equal with Christ; we’re not “the Son” in the sense that He is. God is His Father in a different sense than He’s our Father. The same distinction applies to Christ’s reference to “my God and your God.” The Father is His God in another sense than that in which He’s our God, and this merely supports economic subordination.

The Biblical Witness

With some major objections to the deity of Christ behind us, let’s proceed to the actual proofs of this doctrine. First, the Scriptures abound with references to the deity of Christ. Perhaps the clearest of these references is found in the first chapter of John’s gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1:1).

The Arians, not to be outdone, have invented a way around this text. The lack of the Greek definite article before the word God, they say, requires that the verse be translated, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” But Greek authorities will testify that the lack of the definite article merely indicates that the word is in the predicate rather than the subject of the sentence; it’s a normal grammatical construction. In fact, the same construction occurs throughout the same chapter of John’s gospel: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (v. 6); “But to as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (v. 12). These texts cannot be rendered “There was a man sent from a god” or “To them gave he power to become the sons of a god.”

John’s first epistle claims Christ’s deity: “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:20). Paul affirms Christ’s Godhood in Romans 8:11: “But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” In this one verse, the phrases “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” are used synonymously, showing that Christ is equal with God. And look at Romans 9:5: “Who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.” (Though this verse has come under grammatical fire from those who don’t like Christ’s deity.)

When the risen Lord appeared to Thomas (Jn. 20:26), the formerly doubtful apostle fell down before Him and cried out, “My Lord and my God” (v. 28). The words of a possibly fallible man, sure. But had Jesus not been God, He would have certainly rebuked Thomas as He’d previously rebuked Peter (Mt. 16:23) and the sons of Zebedee (Lk. 9:55). Yet He didn’t, and John urges his readers to believe on Christ in the same way Thomas did (v. 31).

Second, Christ is worshipped as God. This is a serious problem for Arians, since God commands, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). Yet God says of Christ, “Let all the angels of God worship him” (Heb. 1:6) and Christ declares, “The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (Jn. 5:22-23). “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:13).

Third, the unity of God demands the deity of Christ. Throughout the Old Testament, God declares Himself to be the supreme Ruler of all the universe, the One compared to whom all others are nothing. He says, “There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me” (Isa. 45:21). “To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?” (Isa. 46:5). “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me” (Isa. 46:9). As Geoffrey Thomas states, “The Bible says that there is only one God. It does not say that there is one being who is immeasurably superior and wiser and better than all others. It says that there is one beside whom there is absolutely nothing.” Thomas continues,

If Jesus Christ be not Jehovah, then far from the Jehovah of the Bible being unique, infinitely alone, and matchless in…all His perfections, there is at least one creature to whom…belong all the attributes whereby God can be distinguished and marked out. He lacks nothing that the one living God is and has….That is the end of the unity of God. Jesus Christ is a second god, and the chief rival and adversary on earth to the blessed and only Potentate.. (Geoffrey Thomas, “The Divine Glory of Christ” [Part 1], full text available from here.)

The Son of God, the divine Logos, is God-the second Person of the Trinity. He’s identified as God, possesses the attributes of God, and is worshipped as God. To make Christ out to be anything less is to utterly misunderstand the Gospel and to make the church guilty of idolatry. Further, if we don’t have the Son in full deity, then we don’t have the Son at all; and if we don’t have the Son, we don’t have the Father either (I Jn. 2:23).

So let’s have no talk about what a great teacher Jesus was. Can the moralistic season’s greetings. And hail, in Wesley’s words, “th’ incarnate deity.”